MOD REBORN, SKA REVITALIZED

MOD REBORN, SKA REVITALIZED

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

by

Penny Valentine

Why don’tyou go to a go-go To strut down in Soho With a two tonic smile N , Goodbye to the pogo t And tired old disco Time for a little more Let your heart dance.

Secret Affair’s second single, “Let Your Heart Dance," joins the charts in a week when the impact of Mod on the mainstream is so marked that the music stops being a sub-culture.

Down at the Lyceum, The Specials and The Selector are joined by The Beat for a major excursion by the cream of multi-racial ska/ rocksteady bands. A massive audience of Mods is supplemented by frantic journalists jostling to elbow in to The Event. An NME reporter is heard at the door hustling for his press pass; “But if 1 can’t get in, how can I review it...?” Wafts plaintively on the night air. By such cries shall ye know that Mod music has not only made the grade butthe gravy. It seems therefore unsurprising that Bob Geldof is checking it out but, more importantly, so isSiouxsie Sioux.

The Specials and The Selector have hit singles the same week as Secret Affair. The Beat (signed already to the Specials’ 2-Tone label) are only a dance step away from joining, them. At the Lyceum, the audience dances. Down the road Madness—originally on 2-Tone, now on Stiffare at the Electric Ballroom. Their single, which prevails upon the listener to do little more than “Don’t listen to that, listen to this,” is also on the chart. At the ballroom, everyone dances.

Itis no surprise that Talking Heads come in not to play their usual concert halls but the Hammersmith Palais (de dance). From across the Atlantic they have sniffed the way things are going here. Moving feet, not talking heads.

The first time aroundr Mods danced. They danced to bluebeat, they danced to specialised American soul records. They moved neat and tight. The first time round Mods remained a sub-culture and a threat to the status quo Until they thought they were too old. This time round Mod music is entertainment. Punk was about commitment, defined change, assault on the establishment. Emerging so close on those heels, Mod has been accused of being reactionary. Tame, merely a revival that the music business can tuck in neatly without worrying. Ian Page, Secret Affair’s highly articulate lead singer and songwriter, states that his motivation through the band’s music is to somehow aim for a class and income equality. To a generation of journalists reared on punk, the statement is not explicit enough, not political enough, not defined ehough—how will this be achieved? To them, especially since the new mod music is so acceptable and exploitable, it does not carry enoughcbut.

There was no revolution, even though punk was a razor blade across the main vein of die business. It left its heritage, at least, by showing alternatives. You could DIY. Mod music of the 80’s does not point a finger of accusation but burrows into itself, forms its identity by harking back to other statements: the kids are alright; if kids were united they’d never be defeated. It may no longer be a sub-culture but it could be a sub-image, a kind of new youth pride. The Specials’ new album is a kind of musical reflection of their visual irripact, a separating and coming together of multi-racial influences: white boys got their problems, black boys got their problems. If s a subtle, muted point. Reared in an environment where the meaning was less obtuse, where punk yelled this is wrong, this is 'right, this is the problem, lyrics now are studied harder by writers and sociologists than at any time since American journalists and audiences afike thought the Moody Blues and Yes were saying something of Mind Bogging Importance (they weren’t) .

If Mod owes to punk—and it does—then the most obvious comparison for the new music is probably Sham 69: the thin chord between the punk belly button and the Mod baby. But you couldn’t dance easily to them. Punk dance was a new movement of the angry. Hard, violent, without containing edges or recognisable signs. Mod music is, after all else, about dancing. It owes to original dance influences like bluebeat (more pronounced in The Specials, Selector, Madness and The Beat) and soul (more overt in Secret Affair) and it opens up the floor.

I enjoy dancing. If it is a mindless pursuit (one is normally not given to making revolutionary pronouncements during me middle breaks), then my life has had no purpose for ten or fifteen years of walking my dog, of reaching out, of standing in the shadows of love, of dancing in the street. I refuse to believe that and it made me feel so good for a while. At the same time you don’t achieve i anything very concrete by dancing, it’s true. Mod music is about style lyrically and dance musically. There are political implications about dancing just as there are about everything else we do—particularly it seems to me, since Mod is still so male-oriented, about women and dancing, but that’s something I’m not ready to tackle in this column right now. Suffice it to say that, on a superficial level, punk stopped me dancing for two reasons: I wasn’t fit enough on enough parks i of cigarettes a day to keep London warm to try | leaping up and down for any length of time; I looked too old. Punk dance inhibited me. Ska/ bluebeat .makes me shuffle because that’s the kind of music it is; Secret Affair make me dance because they use soul riffs and the musical construction means, more or less, involuntary movement.

I can’t dance at all to “Eton Rifles,” the Jam’s hit. Odd about the Jam. Really they were the first Mod band and everyone discounted them because they were too close to punk to be taken seriously. Too fresh-faced, too closely-cropped, too neat, too melodic. Too clean by far. Now “Eton Rifles” sounds more punk than Mod and Setting Sons, their new album, looks like Siouxsie and the Banshees’ last and sounds as though it owes a little round the edges to the more avant-garde stuff that’s been going down around the outskirts of the punk to Mod move. Lyrically Setting Sons promotes the Jam further away from the new Mods because the songs are crafted, their images are serious. Scene setting backwards, it starts with a Mod anthem, “Saturday Kids”, and actuaOy aims something quite epic: to set this in historical context, through images conjured up from the First World War and the loss of the Empire, deliberately reflecting certain reactionary nostalgic, deeply ingrained British attitudes.

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LETTER FROM BRITAIN

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Secret Affair’s Paige invented the term Glory Boys for the new Mods, reiterating the “Hope 1 die before I get old”; original Mod ethos. Like The Specials, Secret Affair took punk business ideology by forming their own label and having control—I-Spy records. Glory, Boys is their first album. One of the tracks is Smokey Robinson’s “Going To A Go-Go”, another is called “New Dance”. Other titles sound more hefty than they turn out to be. “Time For Action”, their first successful single and “Days Of Change” are titles that sound politicising. In fact, the only statement to emerge is reflective: a thumb at the idols and the rich, a mirror image for the new Mod to check himself out against:

, “This is the time for acfion/Time to be seen”...The action is unspecified and personal, decorative rather than barricade-burning.

“Look at sweet Julia/Speeding on the late night train/They’re laughing at the way she dresses/She’s too smart and clean/She dori’t care/Because she knows she’s right”...And “Days Of Change” reiterates the feeling that Mod continues punk’s changes but doesn’t, in itself, make changes: “The days of change will still remain/And the need for change will find a new way.. .and the need for change is here to stay...”

The Specials’ best dance track says “We can’t force you to enjoy this music”. Every track on Glory Boys is an incitement to respond physically to its combination of tidy “beat” vocals and soaring Stax-influenced horn work. The new Mod music may present a message which merely says groom yourself up, look smart and have a good time but it always did really and, this time ’round, it has at its least presented the first dndiginous British dance fuel.

Gang of Four say important things and are politically acute to what they’re doing. I listen to them carefully and it’s good they’re around. But dance to them I don’t. Didn’t you know, to mis-quote Gladys Knight, you had to dance sometimes?